A Fine Little Revival

Jack London Loves Purple

California: The New Frontier

Beachboy Life

Duke Kahanamoku

Surf Shooting Down Under

The Bronzed Islander Shows How

Surfing in the Jazz Age

Tom Blake Redesigns the Sport

What Depression?

When Clubbies Ruled Australia

Surfboard as Woodcraft

Palos Verdes Surfing Club

San Onofre: the Nearest Faraway Place

Riding the Hot Curl

Enter Makaha

Death at Waimea

The Overwhelming North Shore

Gliding Return

Jack London dutifully praised Alexander Hume Ford in “A Royal Sport” as a wave-riding authority, then turned his attention to another, more commanding figure. “Shaking the water from my eyes as I emerged from one wave, and peering ahead to see what the next one looked like,” London wrote, “I saw him tearing in . . . standing upright on his board, carelessly poised, a young god bronzed with sunburn.” This was twenty-three-year-old Waikiki local George Freeth, and he had that effect on people. Ford may have been early surfing’s great organizer, and London its celebrity troubadour—but Freeth was the one who actually got out there among the big smoking combers and rode.

Quiet and well-bred, the part-Hawaiian grandson of a British shipping magnate, Freeth began riding waves in the mid-1890s. By the time he came to London's attention in 1907, he was known from Hilo to Honolulu as an expert swimmer, a daring practitioner of “high and fancy” platform diving, and the islands’ best surfer. He would later be credited as having reintroduced the lost art of stand-up surfing, but that wasn’t quite the case. The stand-up form never completely disappeared, though most surfers at the time preferred belly- and knee-riding.

Less than two months after Freeth and Ford teamed up and gave London his first surfing lesson, Freeth sailed from Honolulu to San Francisco, with proper letters of introduction and a small stipend from the Hawaiian Promotion Committee. His intention was to introduce surfing to the mainland. No return passage was booked. Freeth was possibly estranged from his family—his parents were divorced, his mother had filed for bankruptcy, and a relative later described the Freeth family as “dysfunctional”—and he seemed to have no real career prospects in Hawaii. Freeth left San Francisco almost immediately, perhaps because the city was still busy digging out from the 1906 earthquake, but more likely because the cool fog-bound local beaches obviously weren’t suited to his needs. From the downtown train station, he headed south to Los Angeles.

Freeth wouldn’t be the first person to surf in North America. More than twenty years earlier, a Kauai chief had sent his three adolescent sons to military school in San Mateo, California. In the summer of 1885, the boys made themselves boards out of local redwood and paddled into the surf at the San Lorenzo rivermouth in Santa Cruz. “The young Hawaiian princes,” reported a local paper, were “giving interesting exhibitions of surfboard swimming as practiced in their native islands, [and] enjoying it hugely.” Three years later, according to a scandal sheet called the 

, a bare-shouldered “Sandwich Island Girl” was seen riding her wooden plank for three days running at Asbury Park, New Jersey, “her body swaying to and fro in harmony with the motion of the waters.” (Was this a made-up bit of titillation or an East Coast surfing milestone? Surfing historians haven’t yet answered the question.) Also, just three or four years before Freeth arrived in California, a young college-age scion of the Aloha Lumber Company in Washington State built a few alaia-style boards out of cedar, which he and his friends used during brief, shivering runs through the still-cold summer surf near Joe Creek, on the Olympic Peninsula.

None of these initial mainland surfing experiments took root, however. George Freeth sailed toward California thinking he would be North America’s first wave-rider.

Los Angeles had become an ideal place for the new and offbeat. In terms of surfing basics, it had sunny weather, beautiful beaches, tolerably warm water for most of the year, and consistent waves. Just as important, Los Angeles would try anything; it inhaled people, and exhaled ideas and trends. This was the only place in early-twentieth-century America where surfing might be embraced as something more than a curiosity.

Los Angeles was itself a curiosity. People came to the city to start over or to be part of the next big thing, and everything seemed to boom here. Over a hundred new Los Angeles County towns were mapped and named in the late 1880s. Five million orange trees were planted in the 1890s. After the first 1890s oil strikes, derricks sprouted up by the thousands in residential neighborhoods. Sophisticates from New York, Chicago, and San Francisco generally regarded Los Angeles with scorn or raised-eyebrow amusement—“Tip the world on its side,” Frank Lloyd Wright offered, “and everything loose will land in Los Angeles”—and true enough, the city earned its reputation by welcoming roadside freak shows, wigwam hotels, gondola rides, Arabian-themed bathhouses, and a long roster of visionaries, hedonists, utopians, healers, cranks, and charismatics. None of which stopped people from coming. Though Los Angeles’ greatest population booms wouldn’t begin until the 1920s, by the time George Freeth arrived, in the summer of 1907, the population had more than doubled over the past five years, and fully three-quarters of the city’s 275,000 residents were born out of state.

The vast Los Angeles Basin had few internal borders or boundaries, and individual mobility was highly prized. Hundreds of miles of light rail line radiated out from downtown, most running west and south, with many lines terminating at a series of newly-incorporated beach cities. One of these, Redondo Beach, was owned by Henry Huntington, the flamboyantly mustachioed land baron who also ran the Pacific Electric Railway, LA’s dominant light rail line. The Pacific Electric network—locals called it the Red Car—was created in large part to deliver the typical middle-class wage earner from LA’s overheated interior to the ocean-cooled beachfront, where he would disembark at places like Huntington’s enormous Hotel Redondo, remove his derby and sack coat, change into a woolen bathing costume, take to Huntington’s gigantic indoor saltwater plunge, shade himself inside Huntington’s 34,000-square-foot Moorish pavilion/ballroom, watch any number of free open-air attractions, and perhaps thoughtfully gaze out across the hundreds of newly surveyed lots to the east—all owned by Huntington, of course, and all for sale.

In the summer and fall of 1907, twice each weekend afternoon, at 2 and 4 pm, visitors were invited to the water’s edge in front of the Hotel Redondo, where a megaphone-wielding announcer introduced George Freeth as “the Hawaiian wonder” who could “walk on water.” Wearing a tight green two-piece woolen bathing suit, Freeth was already positioned beyond the surf line. As the crowd applauded, he’d wheel his heavy 8-foot redwood plank around, paddle for a wave, jump to his feet, glide toward shore, then paddle back out and do it again. Twenty minutes later, for an encore, he would ride in standing on his head. Finally, powerlifting his board into the crook of his shoulder as he exited the surf, Freeth crossed the sand to the Hotel Redondo changing room, acknowledging the whistles and cheers of approval with a quick self-conscious wave of the hand.

Freeth’s first surf in California was actually a dozen miles north of Redondo, at Venice Beach—a nascent resort community built by cigarette magnate Abbot Kinney, with even bigger and gaudier beachfront attractions. Not long after Freeth arrived in Los Angeles, Huntington put Freeth to work, and he was soon commuting on the Red Car back and forth between the two beach cities, earning a modest income as a lifeguard, swim instructor, and surfing showman. He also gave informal surf lessons, at no charge, mostly to school-age boys. Freeth’s students remembered him as a patient and undemonstrative teacher, who not only taught them how to ride but how to make their own boards. In later years, while visiting other beach cities between Los Angeles and San Diego, Freeth continued to give surf lessons and demonstrations. Afterward, his students often clustered together and formed homegrown surf colonies, which in turn grew and divided and spread—eventually creating the foundation for California beach culture.

Freeth himself remained something of an oddity. He was handsome, but not overwhelmingly so, with black hair, dark skin, and doleful blue eyes. Though naturally trim and wiry, endless swimming and paddling had given him the surfer’s classic V-shaped upper body. Freeth became more famous for his lifeguarding work than his surfing, and during a heavy winter storm in 1908 he jumped off Venice Pier several times to rescue a group of capsized Japanese fisherman—a front-page act of heroism that earned him a Congressional Gold Medal. On a sunny summer day at the beach, men gathered around and waited their turn to earnestly grip Freeth’s hand, while the bolder women patted his bare arms and shoulders. But Freeth apparently had almost no life away from the beaches and pools. He never married. He lived in hotels and boardinghouses, politely turned down invitations to social events, and in 1919, at age thirty-five, died alone in a San Diego hospital, a victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic. None of his family attended the memorial service.

For decades, Freeth remained a secondary figure in the surf-pioneer pantheon. He left almost no written account, was rarely photographed in the waves (none of the three known photos of Freeth surfing are especially impressive), and had about him a stillness and melancholy that doesn’t fit with the sport’s kinetic, swaggering self-image. Recently, though, his reputation has again risen. Freeth is now recognized not just as the first “name” surfer but as a worthy envoy, along with Duke Kahanamoku, between surfing’s indigenous Polynesian past and its modern future. Also, with dozens of lifesaving credits to his name, Freeth welded surfing and beachfront heroism, and the two would remain linked for nearly fifty years.

The Freeth legacy also includes the surfing truism that a really dedicated wave-rider has to make sacrifices, sometimes big ones, in nearly every other aspect of life—education, career, family, relationships, and until recently, social standing. And last, Freeth was the first commercialized surfer. Freeth himself probably made little or no distinction between riding for pleasure and riding for money, but future generations of surfers would debate the subject endlessly.

Los Angeles would try anything; it inhaled people, and exhaled ideas and trends. This was the only place in early-twentieth-century America where surfing might be embraced as something more than a curiosity.

Chapter: 2

Gliding Return

California: The New Frontier

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